So, a week on from the digital premiere, with the film now available on Amazon (at least in the US) and its IMDB rating dropping like a stone (currently 2.5)...did anybody here give it a look?
I missed the first half hour of the premiere, but caught the remaining 7500000 minutes and it was...not good. Quite impressively spectacularly jaw-droppingly bad, in fact. Wasn't expecting much, but held out hope that the sheer volume of Trek talent involved might manage to salvage something out of the car-crash of a script. Sadly, that was not to be; if anything, that sheer volume of actors worked against the film, because it seemed like absolutely everything that got shot was included. No matter how irrelevant their cameo, absolutely no-one was left out - and because (aside from Wang, Russ and Masterson) most of these are just cameos shot weeks, months (and sometimes years) apart, almost none of them tied into the main 'story'. The film could have ended half a dozen times but then continued on because there were still 30 minutes of cameos left to get through.
Snoop Dogg is probably the biggest example of the film's problems; his may be an impressive name to have attached to the project (and that's about all he brings to the production) but his inclusion is so distracting because he's not really in the film; most of his stuff was shot so late that he only really interacts with a couple of the Trek actors, and the rest of his material just seems to hi-jack the film when we haven't seen him for a while. Random shots of him and his pony laughing in little pop-up bubbles appear over 'dramatic' moments, as if implying that they're having some influence on events, but the main 'action' just carries on regardless. Reminded me of various old 50s B-movies where the director had the likes of Bela Lugosi or John Carradine for an afternoon, so filmed whatever they could and tried in vain to make it relevant in the editing room afterwards...
The story was almost non-existent, the 'humor' was desperate bordering on pathetic, and the final product was just kind of...sad. With so many hugely talented people involved, in front of and behind the camera (it really isn't a badly directed or bad looking film, and is certainly competently made enough to be classified as a film) it would have been nice to see something that really made use of all that talent. Maybe something that celebrated Star Trek a little, rather than taking its inspiration from the 'Epic Movie'-style world of 'parody' films. All the actors are giving it their best, but they really didn't need to. It just made me feel more sorry for them, and for the wasted potential in every single frame of this embarrassment.
Would not recommend.